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Charlie Hebdo was nothing to do with Freedom of Speech

The Charlie Hebdo attack is still serving as a hook on which to hang discussions about freedom of speech. So I’m posting here the text of a talk I gave (not quite word for word) at a meeting of the Edinburgh Branch of the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) on 16 February.

A couple of days before the meeting, a gunman had opened fire on an event in Copenhagen entitled “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression”, killing one person, and had then opened fire again the following day outside a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing another person. The suspected gunman was subsequently shot dead by police.

Freedom of speech is a precious and complicated thing and warrants discussion. But the demonstrations that followed the Charlie Hebdo attack, and the images and slogans that went with them, didn’t have anything to do with freedom of speech at all.

When I was asked to speak at this meeting, I thought that the passage of time since the attack in Paris would help to give some perspective on it. The murders in Copenhagen over the weekend mean on the contrary that the issue is still a raw one. The background to the Copenhagen incident remains unclear and the repercussions are still to be seen, so I’m going to focus on the Paris attack last month.

The men who carried out the attack in Paris weren’t simply some hotheads outraged by Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of the Prophet. The firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices a few years ago might perhaps be seen like that, but the attack this year was obviously more calculated.

It wouldn’t have happened but for the wars instigated by the US and Britain that have been tearing the Middle East apart since 9/11. Possibly it still wouldn’t have happened but for the fact that everyone seems to be expecting an escalation of the conflict with ISIS in Iraq in the next few months.

The attack was horrible, but it’s important to keep it in perspective. It has been described as France’s 9/11, but of course it was far smaller than 9/11 or the 2005 London bombings, and far smaller than the killings that are happening now in Nigeria and Syria.

What happened immediately after the Paris killings was another matter, and deserves a lot of thinking about. About 1.5 million people demonstrated in Paris that Sunday in solidarity with the murder victims. There were large demonstration in other cities in France too, all mobilised in just a few days. The Paris demo was probably the biggest ever held in France. It was on the same kind of scale as the February 2003 demonstration in Britain against the Iraq war. But it wasn’t remotely the same kind of thing.

Perhaps people would quite often march in their millions for murder victims, if they had the opportunity to do so and came to believe there was some momentum and purpose behind what they were doing. But that doesn’t in fact happen. When two Kurdish women activists were assassinated in their Paris office in January 2013 – probably by agents of the Turkish state – nothing remotely like this year’s demo happened.

The mass mobilisation this year can’t be explained by empathy alone. It was focussed on symbols and ideas, not people. For a lot of the French media and political leaders, it was about the “values of the Republic.” For their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, it was about “European values.”

Even the phrase “Union Sacrée” was used – exactly the phrase used when French socialists capitulated to war fever in 1914. Whenever that phrase is used in France, you can be sure that something very dirty is afoot.

For all the people demonstrating with those cute pen symbols, it was about “freedom of expression.” The only good thing to come out of the demo was that a lot of people noticed that the world leaders lining up to be photographed in Paris weren’t exactly champions of a free press, and that French law itself has a rather shaky grasp of freedom of expression.

I don’t think it’s quite right to see this as hypocrisy. Hollande and Netanyahu and the other world leaders who lined up in Paris knew that the freedom of expression thing was just a code for something else. The “freedom of expression” slogan was actually no more about the right to express yourself than the tricolour is about colour coordination.

If you want to understand what 1.5 million people on a state-friendly demo really means, you only have to listen to what the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, had already said.

He had said the day before the demo that France was engaged in “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”

The war against terrorism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a real war fought with planes and tanks and detention camps and torture. Manual Valls seems to proposing a war of that kind against radical Islam and anything thought to be un-French.

A symbol that was everywhere – on the streets of Paris and beyond – was the slogan “Je suis Charlie.”

Charlie isn’t much of a thing to be. The Charlie Hebdo magazine directed its satire at a lot of targets, some of them the kind of targets that satire washes off like water off a duck’s back. But it seemed to particularly like targeting Islam, and Muslims, and Arabs. It did it with images that borrow from every nasty racist stereotype you’ve ever seen, and every islamophobic dog-whistle phrase you’ve ever heard.

What’s called the right to freedom of expression really amounts to the right to colonial plunder. It goes something like this:

“You guys have got a Prophet? Right, we’ll have some of that. You don’t make images of your Prophet? Fantastic! Our images will have so much more impact.”

It’s just another form of cultural appropriation. It’s interesting that some of the people who were quickest to see it were anti-racist activists in the US, especially people who had been active over Ferguson and the “Black Lives Matter” protests.

It used to seem that here in Europe our proximity to the Islamic world led people to take a more nuanced approach to the so-called “war on terror” than was usual in the US. That’s changing, and it creates new dangers as well as some new opportunities to form progressive alliances.

Every time we hear the old “clash of civilisations” junk, we need to think back 3 or 4 years and remember how Tahrir Square became the inspiration for the Occupy movement, for movements against austerity in Spain, for movements against austerity in Greece. The way that the Arab Spring was subsequently undermined and destroyed and soaked in blood isn’t very different from the strategy that we see working to destroy resistance to austerity here.

Charlie Hebdo’s racism is a symptom of a wider problem in France.

At the moment, France is the most islamophobic country in the EU, in terms of state and institutional islamophobia. The extent of islamophobia in daily life is harder to assess, but the entrenchment of islamophobia in law, in politics and in public institutions is very clear.

The French left hasn’t attempted to organise against the National Front and Le Pen in anything like the way UAF has managed here. Hand-in-hand with that, there’s been a failure to challenge islamophobia within the left.

In the French municipal election last March, a lot of Muslims voted for the National Front. The media generally reported that as a backlash against gay marriage. But when I was at an islamophobia conference in London in December, organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, I heard a different story.

Muslims had voted for the National Front not because they believed it had anything to offer them, but in order to punish the left in the sharpest way possible.

It worked. The left began to take Muslims seriously.

But that was in December. Now the French Prime Minister is at war with radical Islam, people have been arrested in France for expressing vague sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo attackers, and there is a mass campaign in French schools requiring children to say “I am Charlie Hebdo.” And inevitably there has been a spate of attacks on mosques and Muslims.

Most probably we’ll soon see Hollande trying to use the theme of national unity and the “Union Sacrée” to prop up the austerity measures that caused his Socialist Party such losses in the March elections.

Here in Britain, we’ve seen the Charlie Hebdo attack used to give an extra push to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act that was already being railroaded through Parliament.

The Act is potentially the most far-reaching and the most directly islamophobic and divisive of all the anti-terrorist legislation enacted over the last 15 years. There are still opportunities to resist it, especially here in Scotland where key parts of the Act depend on statutory instruments that are still to be agreed by Westminster, and that require consultation with the Scottish Government. We need to seize these opportunities.

One thought on “Charlie Hebdo was nothing to do with Freedom of Speech”

I’ve only just stumbled across this article of yours while looking through the net in the aftermath of the PEN controversy, hence the lateness of my comment. I’ve commented on an article that you wrote about Charlie in the SACC website before.

You certainly come across in your profile as a good guy fighting the good fight. I’d like to extend my sympathies for any loss you might be feeling over the apalling tragedy in Nepal. The world is a very unfair and unequal place and it often seems that those who have the least get the worst heaped on them.,

I hope I am being accurate in summing up your position on Charlie Hebdo as thus:

Charlie Hebdo were anti-muslim bigots who’s provocations led to an attack that was all too understandable in the current geopolitical climate and the governments of the west have been able to use the deaths of the cartoonists to full advantage in the west’s ‘war on terror’.

There is so much information about Charlie Hebdo now translated into English on the internet, that it cannot be lack of information that leads you to this posiiton. You must need to think it on some level.

Neoliberalism is one power bloc in the world, the dominant one. The enemies of it are not all like us Richard. In fact some of it’s more robust challengers are very unlike us. The leftists who helped overturn the rule of the Shah in Iran were very surprised that they, with all of their progressive thought and revolutionary theory, could not sideline the clerics of Iran and found themselves, instead, a few attempted coups later, facing the noose or the firng squad. Thousands upon thousands of the leftist mujahadeen died this way. I’ve looked at all of their names. Islamic fundamentalism is clerical fascism. It contains within it none of the saving graces of socialism (an attempt at fairness for all) but cares only for a narrow few who are prepared to live by a very narrow definition of Islam. These narrow factions in turn battle each other. The minority Shia fundamentalists in Iran must now, with the rise of ISIS, feel like a man who has inadvertantly lit a fuse that leads to his hown house. ISIS do not recognise the right of the ‘apostate’ Shia to even live.

I knew many Iranians when I was as a student at North Middlesex Poly in London as it was called then in the early eighties, leftists who fled this darkness. They would have been astonished to know that they only had one of two choices, neoliberalism or islamic fundamentalism. Like me, like Charlie Hebdo, they adhered to the idea that you can and should challenge as much wrong as you see in the world and that fascism comes in many colours.

They were, even at that time, angered by the western left’s tendency to view the muslim world as homogenous islamic puppets, pushed here and there by western policy. This is a post- colonialist view that has in reality never gotten past colonialism and sees the west as the benign guardians of the world’s welfare, for good or bad. It cannot see the sweep of history prior to the rise of the west and it cannot see beyond it. It is, in it’s own subtle way, highly racist. Yes, western policy has exacerbated the situation, and probably facilitated the rise of Islamic fundementalism, but it is not master and creator of it any more than France and Britain were the masters and creators of Nazi Germany.

Islamic fundamentalism is troubling us here in the west, but it is decimating the muslim world. They have borrowed some of the most effective tactics of Marxist Leninism, married with fascism and have brought them right up to date. The islamists, like some revolutionary scientific socialists, think that their revolution is urgent and necessary and that they have dispensation (divine in their case) for almost any means necessary . They need to provoke war in order to polarise their own populations and convince them of the necessity of their own highly fascistic version of Islam. Naj’s ‘Management of Savagery’ is the text followed by ISIS and is a guide for total destabilization. Read it if you haven’t already Richard. Pieter Van Oestyn the Belgian arabist has excellent translations on his website.

What can or should be done? How do you combat something like this and show solidarity to the countless people of muslim heritage who are on the front line against this kind of fascism, yet at the same time, avoid falling into the neoliberal camp and their stupid war on terror and their ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative? How do we do this without becoming apologists for a neoliberal world order? Salman Rushdie found out that you cannot apologise. No matter how much you apologise and how good your anti-neoliberal credentials are, nothing short of prior submission will save you.

Charlie Hebdo’s was the only true satire left in Europe post Salman Rushdie because it refused to exempt those who threatened to execute writers and artists. If you cannot satirize the hardest targets, the most dangerous ones, and instead opt only those who give consent (albeit grudgingly), then all of your satire is essentially hollow. Charlie were supported by countless people of muslim heritage across the world who were heartened that somewhere, in an office in Paris, someone could still produce satire ridiculing Islam in response to the fatwas.

I use the term ‘response’ here Richard, because this is what it was. Charlie Hebdo did not draw Mohammed on a whim or for the hell of it. They certainly did not draw him because they were racist (France’s main anti-racist organization SOS Racisme, who had Charlie as one of it’s main partners would be surprised by this characterization of them), and I know they did not have a death wish. They wanted to live as human beings free to question and ridicule the tenets of all the worlds religions and thought it imperative (as much of the left do) that this was allowed. The Islamic fundamentalists gave notice, globally, that this was not allowed, and that those who attempted it would be executed. Once this notice was given, if you really believed in the value and purpose of your satire, you had give the counterpunch, you really had no choice. If you and many other muslims and non muslims, choose not to see this context, then not only is this sad, it is also highly dangerous.

I am not a fan of everything about laicite, but I am also not a fan of the British model of multiculturalism. I agree with almost everything Kenan Malik has to say on this issue. Secularism is something I would die for because I believe it is a good that allows freedom of conscience for individuals. We all get to question ideologies and to come to our own conclusions about why we are here. I do not see this as some meaningless bauble handed out to those who comply with neoliberalism and I vehemently oppose all leftists who do. Freedom of conscience, of speech, of expression, is vital to our collective mental health and our ability to adapt and improve as human beings.

The very real assaults of secularism will not be, in the end, tolerated in societies where the populations have taken it’s benefits for granted for some time now. If the left do not defend this, by default it’s defense will fall to the right. All of your fears about tsunami sized blowback against the muslim populations of Europe will then come true Richard. The Islamic fundamentalists want this because they believe in a transcendent truth where this life is a shadow of the life to come and believe they are doing muslims a favour by bringing them to this battle. The left have no excuse. Countless lives that cannot be recovered will be lost due to their stupidity. If some muslims here in Europe, thanks to the collective information rained down on themfrom the left and the islamists, think that red lines need to be drawn under freedom of expression and blasphemy laws revisited, then that is very sad and troubling. Like the clerical revolutionaries of Iran, those who attack Charlie Hebdo here, are lighting a fuse that leads to their own house.

I am sorry that I am long winded and not a particularly good writer Richard. I have devoted much of my life to the study of ideology but I am better at thinking it than expressing it. By the way. The reasons for french muslims voting for Front Nationale are to punish the left, but not for the reasons you may think they are punishing them. Have a look at this link. There are similarities with why some immigrants here are voting UKIP.

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